CRIME; Never Let Me Go

By Marilyn Stasio

Published: April 22, 2007

It's always interesting to see what genre authors will get up to when they take a break from an established mystery series and write what their publishers designate a ''stand-alone'' book. P. D. James, the queen bee of the classic British detective story, surprised her readers with a futuristic thriller, ''The Children of Men.'' Dennis Lehane wrote ''Mystic River,'' a crime novel of such astonishing emotional depth that it put his career on a whole new track. Anne Perry, with three historical mystery series up and running, undertook a Christmas tale so charming that it led to yet another series. Robert B. Parker came out with a cookbook.

Whenever Laura Lippman takes a work break from the lively adventures she's been writing for the past 10 years about a quick-witted Baltimore sleuth named Tess Monaghan, it's more a stretch than a vacation, an opportunity to examine more closely the criminal behaviors and psychological motivations that have to be wrapped up swiftly and neatly in action-oriented procedurals. In particular, there is something about the impact of violent crime on children that obsesses this author, and from time to time she has explored the theme from a child's perspective.

In WHAT THE DEAD KNOW (Morrow/HarperCollins, $24.95), Lippman takes an imaginative leap and exercises a considerable amount of narrative ingenuity to solve the 30-year-old mystery of who abducted the two Bethany sisters from a Baltimore shopping mall -- a crime suggested by a true-life event that gripped the city in 1975. All but forgotten when the story opens, the disappearance of 15-year-old Sunny and 11-year-old Heather becomes an active police case when a woman injured in a highway accident claims to be Heather but refuses to explain the circumstances of her kidnapping or why she has returned to town.

Is this infuriatingly reticent stranger the victim of an extended trauma? Could she be an impostor, an accomplice in the crime or even a murderer? The puzzle of her identity becomes more tantalizing because of the oblique manner of the storytelling, a complex pattern of multiple timelines and shifting focuses that keeps expanding the perspective on the central characters by presenting them at various stages in the unfolding plot. But as artful as she is at interweaving disarming scenes of two spirited girls on the day they vanished with painful moments in the lives of their parents -- maintaining all the while a thread of continuity in the current-day police investigation -- Lippman pulls off something more ambitious than a high-wire act of technical virtuosity. With great thought and compassion, she uses her fractured narrative style to delve into the ways in which every serious crime tears to shreds the lives of its victims.

Donald E. Westlake gets the last laugh in his comic mystery WHAT'S SO FUNNY? (Warner, $24.99), with an ending so laden with irony it almost has you thinking that crime doesn't pay. But of course it does pay, in those laughs that land on every page, when the criminals involved are Westlake's congenitally depressed master thief, John Dortmunder, and his merry band of colorful crooks. The gang's new caper is a doozy, but impossible to execute: the theft of a priceless chess set hammered in gold and encrusted with precious gems, an extravagant, if ill-timed, gift to Czar Nicholas II that is now buried in the underground vault of a bank in Midtown Manhattan. The resourceful Dortmunder comes up with a scheme to convince one of the owners of this rare artifact that it should be raised from its vault. To pull off this stunt takes a full cast of bizarre characters and enough plot twists to keep them all tied up in knots. But if the author's inventive mind never fails him in this devious enterprise, neither does his wit; some of the richest humor comes from his droll observations on mundane matters like the proper costume to wear to a party in SoHo and the best highway route for getting out of the city when you're driving a hot van.

For a hard-boiled gumshoe who's been on the job since Hector was a pup, Loren D. Estleman's Detroit private eye, Amos Walker, still leads the pack in the brute stamina and inbred survival skills of his species. In AMERICAN DETECTIVE (Forge/Tom Doherty, $24.95), Walker applies his traditional code (honor, valor, muscle) to the case of a former pitcher for the Tigers whose daughter has attracted a fortune hunter who needs to be shooed away. Besides yielding the usual gunplay and fisticuffs, along with choice baseball metaphors (''Most of my hunches pop up into the catcher's mitt''), the well-oiled plot is supple enough to handle the newfangled criminal enterprises that a big-city shamus has to contend with nowadays. But Estleman also delivers some outstanding stuff on the hazards of the profession, including a bone-chilling stakeout on a lonely lake in the dead of night, that could come only from an old pro.

I sometimes wonder if foreign mystery authors realize how exotic their work seems to us. Given the candid nature of our own crime fiction, American readers probably won't be shocked by the case of child pornography and devil worship that Helene Tursten's Swedish detective, Inspector Irene Huss of the Goteborg Police Department, investigates in Katarina E. Tucker's translation of THE GLASS DEVIL (Soho, $24). Which is not to say that Tursten doesn't offer here an exciting account of a triple homicide, involving a clerical family living in a remote forested region of southern Sweden. It is just to say that bloody pentagrams and satanic texts seem less piquant than certain customs routinely observed by law enforcement agents, like morning prayers at the station house and the reliance on pastors to help them handle difficult witnesses. No less than Inspector Huss's wide-eyed trips to London, a good foreign crime novel can be a broadening experience.